I run an American company from a Portuguese kitchen table, and I write down everything that breaks.
Seven years ago I filed a Delaware LLC from an apartment in Lisbon with an Italian passport and very little idea what I was doing, and since then I have kept every rejection email, every processing receipt and every date stamp. This journal is that archive, cleaned up, with the federal data behind it pulled fresh so that you can check me.
Every waiting period quoted here was measured against the agency that publishes it, and every one of them has moved at least once. When a timing or a fee changes, you get a short note saying what changed and on what date.
The setup builder
Answer a short list of questions about your passport, your state, the account you actually want and the paperwork you already hold. It builds the document list, an honest timeline and the two or three things that usually kill an application like yours. It remembers your answers, so you can come back in three weeks and it picks up where you left it.
Build my setup
Where you are a taxpayer decides your treaty position and how your identity documents have to travel. Where the company sits decides the fees and the annual deadline.
Every account type below is checked by a different team against a different rulebook. Pick the one you actually need first, because the order matters far more than most people think.
Tick everything you already hold. Anything left unticked lands in the list below with the wait attached to it, in the order I would actually do them.
Your list
Two clocks and a folder
The ITIN wait is the longest single block in this whole process and almost nobody plans around it. The left panel turns the published IRS guidance into actual dates on your calendar. The right one is the folder I wish somebody had handed me back in 2019.
The ITIN clock
The IRS asks you to allow seven weeks for notification about a Form W-7 application, and nine to eleven weeks if you file during the filing season between 15 January and 30 April, or if you file from abroad. Almost every reader of this journal falls into the second group, and quite a few fall into both at once.
The folder
Fifteen documents, in the order a reviewer opens them. Tick them off as you collect. This stays in your browser, so if you close the tab and come back in three weeks it is still sitting here waiting for you.
The complaint file
Every complaint the federal consumer bureau receives is published, searchable by text, with the company and the product attached to it. I pulled every one filed between July 2024 and July 2026 that mentions an ITIN. There are 163. Switch the cut below and watch where they actually land, because it is not where the guides tell you to look.
Read this way
Source: CFPB Consumer Complaint Database, full text search for ITIN, complaints received 1 Jul 2024 to 1 Jul 2026, aggregation buckets, pulled 29 Jul 2026. Complaints are allegations rather than findings, and 163 is a small pile, so this describes shape and not statistical significance.
Eight states, side by side
The fifth column is mine and I have not seen it anywhere else. It counts how many federally insured institutions are actually headquartered in each state, pulled from the FDIC register, because the state everybody recommends for its light paperwork turns out to have almost no local banks sitting inside it. Click any heading to sort.
| State | Filing fee | Every year after | Deadline | Insured banks based there | What it is actually good for |
|---|
Filing and annual figures are the amounts the states themselves publish for a domestic limited liability company, and they do move, so open the state page in the row before you send anybody money. The bank counts are mine, from the FDIC BankFind register pulled on 24 July 2026, counting active insured institutions by the state of their main office.
The letters
Long ones, because the quick one is already everywhere and it is mostly wrong. Each of these is built on data I pulled myself, with the exact query written down inside it so that you can rerun it and correct me.
US bank for foreigners: I read the non-resident score on 10 Bank Index cards, and the only real bank near the top is in Illinois
The 3 largest US banks all score 4.0 for non-resident owners. The top of the list is fintechs, and 1 Illinois bank has a desk for foreign corporations.
How to check MSB registration: what the FinCEN search proves, what it does not, and where a money transmitter license lives
FinCEN does not approve or vet the businesses on its register, a state licence is a separate document, and the enforcement history lives somewhere else again.
I told her the company has nothing to withhold when it pays its own owner, and the definition of a withholding agent does not mention ownership
The definition covers anybody with control or payment of a foreign person’s income, the status applies even when nothing must be withheld, and the liability is personal.
I argued against the 500 dollars for 6 years by comparing it with a number that does not exist
Delaware allows a business to act as its own registered agent only if it is physically located in the state. From Lisbon that option is closed, so the real comparison is a bundle against an agent plus everything else done alone.
I quoted 30 per cent and it was a real rate on a real page, just not the one that applied to them
One bucket taxes profit at graduated rates. The other taxes the gross at a flat 30 per cent with no deductions and no netting. Which one you land in is decided by the business, and a 16 month clock decides whether the deductions survive.
I flew to Miami to open the account, and the rule I was obeying names opening it remotely as an ordinary case
The identification programme asks for 4 items and takes a passport number with the country of issuance. It also requires a procedure for the customer who never appears in person. The rest is one bank's policy.
Sales tax does not ask where you live, and for marketplace sales it does not ask you at all
Washington reaches you at 100 thousand dollars, California at 500 thousand, and neither cares about your passport. The platform collects on marketplace sales, so the exposure that is yours is the direct one.
W-8BEN-E or W-9 for a US LLC: the form follows the owner, not the company
The company is on the list of United States persons and is also disregarded, so the owner signs rather than the entity. The onboarding question asks about the company and never about the owner.
The 1099-K threshold moved 5 times in 5 years and finished where it started
It was 20 thousand dollars, then 600, then 5 thousand, then 2,500, and now 20 thousand and 200 transactions again. The form reports gross, and gross was never your income.
Who is the responsible party for an LLC, and why the bank asks a completely different question
The IRS wants 1 human being who controls the money. The bank wants everyone at 25 percent plus the person who runs the place, and the 2 lists are allowed to disagree.
Form 5472 for a foreign owned LLC: the filing that starts at $25,000 before any tax exists
No US income means no income tax and it does not mean no filing. The wire that opened your bank account is a reportable transaction, and California charges its own 25,000 on top of the federal one.
Do ITIN numbers expire, and the half of you who should do nothing about it
Three consecutive years off a federal return and the number lapses. But an expired number keeps working on 1099s, and the IRS says so in one line I had skimmed for 2 years.
Business credit cards on an LLC with an EIN: I answered the wrong question for two years
I sent people lists of issuers said to take an ITIN. Then I pulled every federal complaint mentioning the number, and three of the four names at the top of the file do not issue cards at all.
ITIN, SSN and EIN: I read two years of federal complaints and the real problem is not the bank
Everybody explains the numbers and then stops. I pulled all 163 complaints that mention an ITIN and found that half of them are not about banking at all, which quietly changes the order you should be doing this in.
Opening a US business account with no Social Security number, path by path
There is no law stopping you. There is an identity stack that cannot see you, which is a completely different problem with a completely different fix, and the fix is boring rather than clever.
I lost my EIN letter: the routes to get the number back, ranked by how long they took me
The IRS will not email it to you and the formation service that filed it often never had it. Here is every route that works from outside the United States, with the real wait attached to each one.